Lynn E. Dobrunz received her S.B. in Engineering and Applied Sciences from Harvard University in 1988. She was awarded a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1994. She did postdoctoral work with Charles F. Stevens in the Department of Molecular Neurobiology at The Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA, and joined the faculty of UAB in 1999. She is currently an Associate Professor of Neurobiology.

My research program uses electrophysiological approaches to study synaptic transmission and regulation of presynaptic properties at synapses in the central nervous system. Synapses in the central nervous system are unreliable in that they release a vesicle of neurotransmitter only a small fraction of the time they receive action potential input. The probability of neurotransmitter release is history dependent, resulting in dynamic modulation of synaptic strength by the timing of stimulation, a phenomenon called short-term plasticity. Short-term plasticity is important for information processing in the brain. In hippocampus, a region of the brain involved in learning and memory, short-term plasticity is a cellular correlate of short-term memory. Using hippocampal brain slices and cultured hippocampal neurons from rodents, my lab studies the presynaptic properties of single synapses and the regulation of presynaptic vesicle release probability and short-term plasticity. We are investigating the role of short-term plasticity in dynamically regulating the balance of excitatory and inhibitory synaptic transmission in hippocampus. We are also studying the changes that occur in presynaptic function during normal postnatal development, and how presynaptic physiology is altered in animal models of developmental disorders that cause cognitive impairment. We are also investigating changes in presynaptic function during normal aging. In addition, we are investigating the role of postsynaptic influences on the formation and function of presynaptic terminals, as well as cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the activity dependent modulation of neurotransmitter release.